Into Harm's Way

About a month ago, I watched the SAPD stop a woman in front of our house.  He was busy on his radio, and she was removing the third clear trash bag full of cans from the back seat while she balanced her toddler on her hip.  Soon the tow truck arrived, and I watched her abandon the cans in favor of the car seat as she carried her child toward the bus stop.  Without a license or insurance she’ll never see her car again.  It could have been much worse.

Had she been deported, after a legal wrangle, she could well have ended up in Tamulipas, the US' current favorite destination.  As bad as things are in Mexico, they are much worse in Tamulipas State.  From Stratfor:  In the past few months, Tamaulipas state experienced a sharp increase in homicides -- from 87 reported in August to 128 in September, according to Mexico's Executive Secretariat of the National System of Public Security. Military operations often lead to violence in Tamaulipas state, but the state is also experiencing a turf war involving Los Zetas, the Gulf cartel and a Los Zetas splinter group led by Ivan "El Taliban" Velazquez Caballero until his recent arrest. These dynamics are likely behind the state's reported increase in violence.

The LA Times reports that deportees arriving in Tamulipas are often searched for phone numbers with US area codes.  Such discoveries often occasion “secuestros” or kidnappings in which deportees are held until US relatives pay a ransom.  Since an obvious ploy is to transpose the area code for a Mexican one, the ploy doesn’t work, and a deportees only recourse is often to pay protection, just to leave the bus station in safety.  What happens to women in such circumstances in unthinkable.

We have often participated in discussions and movements to counter the traffic leading to involuntary sex slavery.

It’s a tragedy that an uncounted majority of such crimes are engendered at the service of saving American tax dollars and serving American domestic policy.  Sending waiters, mechanics and homemakers into harm’s way because we’re done with them is the most vile shortcoming of our Bishop’s political agenda.

We have consistently demonstrated a willingness to spend millions in order to determine how and with whom Protestants conduct marriage ceremonies.  I remind you there has never been a “gay” Catholic marriage.

What we have, however, is a virtually unbroken silence when our co-religionists are delivered into the hands of kidnappers and rapists and murderers.

Help me implore the California Bishops to ask the INS to explain why so many Catholics are being sent into harms way.  Begin with your Pastor.

The Handbasket

In the wake of Occupy most of us have felt a good deal more comfortable denigrating corporations.  An unintended consequence of this, of course, is that the denigration we offer one another is so much more common, and accordingly so much less "impactful."

Accordingly, I'd at least like to respect my few readers enough to issue a few ideas you haven't heard elsewhere and then, should anyone care, try later to develop them further.

These two ideas have a common origin, which is Sabbath economics.  As I learned about Sabbath from Ched Myers, I finally apprehended how merciful and wise the whole structure is.  Predicated in part upon a wise familiarity with how hard and how brief human life is, the Sabbath recognizes culture's obligation to incorporate forgiveness into our common life that it might remain, for the most part and for most people, bearable.

Corporations, however, live forever and have no feelings, and therefore bear nothing.  My first proposal, then, is to deny them bankruptcy.   They live forever, so they have forever to repay their debts, should they incur them.  Now such a discipline would have little effect should share value descend to zero and then languish there forever, so in order to prevent that, my second proposal is that share prices be allowed to go negative.  Shareholders, after a series of legislative adjustments I cannot begin to fathom, would then be required to pay those debts to get rid of them.  After all, if every voting machine manufactured and approved for use in US elections permits casting "negative votes," how hard could it be to have shares with "debt."  At least the concept is logically feasible, unlike the Diebold votes.

In this way, when clever lawyers, each enfolded in their own protective "S" corporations, collude to create closely-held shell corporations to distance well capitalized parents from holding onto looming eco-disasters and public health nightmares like the BP spill or nuclear waste, we can take some protection from knowing that the bill will be paid by those shareholders and not the public.

These two modifications, eliminating corporate bankruptcy and allowing share prices to "go negative" might repair the two largest "loopholes" by which corporations avoid the pain of being persons.  Were we to add in the subject of an upcoming blog, corporate imprisonment, we might then "enflesh' corporations with the kind of pain that might make them responsive enough to slow the disaster of co-existence unfolding before us.

Why the Roman Catholic church, with its profound commitment to the "Human One,"is largely silent on this matter is confounding to me.  Especially since the Roman Catholic Church, alone among all the entities on Earth, partook rarely of these "sins," until recently.  Roman Catholic dioceses are owned and run by corporations sole, the only type of corporation which has a soul and does not eschew responsibility.  This is why we have paid more liability claims than all the cigarette companies on the planet - for the simple reason that, when we owe, we pay.  For me, more than anything else, this is legal proof that the Roman Catholic church is holy.  If we could for one moment retreat from our reactionary stance of opposing everything Mr. Obama does and return to our proper role of addressing the far larger question of how to civilize Western Civilization, I hope this is the issue our Bishops will choose.  It should be remembered that only thirty years ago abortion was only a "catholic issue."

I have often wondered why even libertarians fail to recognize the reality that risk, like heat, can only be transferred and never wished away.  Every ounce of responsibility corporate shareholders eschew is foist upon the public as surely as every therm removed by air conditioning from my overheated palace is blown onto my neighbors' place.

In the same way that we watched antibiotics fall to resistance in a manner than offered no market feedback to increase responsible prescribing practices, and even as we now watch helpless as China fills our air with carbon while it strives to match our standard of consumption, we are surrounded by demons over which we have not only no control, but no handle with which we can wrest control, generally, from chaos.

When people, especially Christian people, create economic (and now political) "persons" with the express intent of making a profit (serving Mammon) while denying personal responsibility six days each week, and rest only on the seventh, true economics portends only one thing:

We are headed to Hell in a handbasket at 86% of "escape velocity," which is the speed at which we eschatologically, demonically, arrive.

"Tons of Homeless Services"

Recently an NPR Reporter asked OccupySA to comment upon a remark by Supervisor John Moorlach, who alleged that the homeless enjoyed "Tons of Services."

I thought it only fair to call Moorlach out:

I once worked for the phone company as a QC programmer, and there I learned a tremendous lesson about service delivery:  We used to map the results of driving around in a van with test instruments, measuring the quality of the signal available.  The results showed we were almost 100% successful at delivering cellular telephone service when and where we carefully measured that service.  But when I pointed out that our van drivers, being intelligent radio technicians, avoided traffic jams and rush hour commutes at all costs, I thereby revealed why all our data was useless:  80% of all customer calls were generated from just those locations at just those times. 

No one from OC Social Services spends enough time inside of "homeless rush hours and traffic jams" to know anything about how these programs are actually "delivered" to the homeless.  In fact, because every dollar spent upon staff is a dollar needed by the homeless, and yet is counted as a successful program expense; they are "in effect" in competition for the same scarce resources.

In the interest of full disclosure, we have the same problem.  We call it "serving concrete."  The most important number, a number we seldom collect, is the weight of the garbage left after a meal.  Obviously, to be 100% successful, all the food should go into someone's belly and all the plates and cups and such should be collected and recycled.  If any food ends up in the garbage, it's called "serving concrete."  Leaving serving stuff behind is just called littering.  Just because we loaded the food into the van doesn't mean they ate it!  Measuring success by totaling payroll budget for the kitchen staff is even less relevant, but Social Services, unlike the ingredients for soup, don't weigh anything.  As a result, the "tons of services" must be measured using only the labor expense.  No wonder we're so successful - no supervisor wants to go on record as hiring incompetents or letting good people twiddle their thumbs - therefore every dollar thus spent is 100% successful, always!

When I took a reporter to the Shelter Providers' Forum to watch ten people exited from the Armory Program get no shelter at all from every program in Orange County, I pointed out the problem: the room was filled with $10,000,000 of Social Workers in a year when the total budget was just under $13,000,000.  Together, the twelve of us watched as these Social Workers argued with Mercy House over credit for leads in the Rapid ReHousing Program.  Apparently they were all retailers and Mercy House was the wholesaler.  The credit they were arguing about determined their share of funds from the Rapid ReHousing budget.

I stood up and asked, "What's Rapid ReHousing?

"Rental Assistance," they replied.  

"It should be simple enough to calculate as a percentage of the funds disbursed," I said, 

"Can anyone tell me just how much money they've handed out for rental assistance?"

No one could.  $10,000,000 worth of Social Workers had argued for two hours in front of a Register reporter and not one of them could recount for the record a single instance in which they'd actually offered any OC resident one penny of rental assistance!  

Now, I understand one part of the problem:  We still get two or three angry "rental assistance" calls every hour we're open, more at the end of the month, and we haven't offered rental assistance in two decades!  If any one of those Social Workers had actually been offering rental Assistance, I could have spotted them from the podium by their bleeding cauliflower ear.  Anyone who gives out "free money" is going to be mobbed.  And it doesn't help to place meticulous restrictions upon the disbursement - that only makes the calls take longer.  Everyone still calls, and almost no one qualifies.  

A final illustration to show why our current homeless programs don't work and cost a fortune:

At that same fateful meeting, a poised, together middle-aged Social Worker mounted the stage and gushed with gratitude.  She had finally been re-hired half-time as a Social Worker for a well known Rapid ReHousing Retailer.  She had spent the better part of a month, and had successfully negotiated the application process for two of her clients.  And what great clients they were:  Each was a full-time nursing student with full-custody; each was finished, finally, with her abusive boyfriend.  Each needed only half a month's rental, and both seemed capable and willing to repay the program within one year of graduation from their nursing program.  To sum up the numbers, one part-time MSW @ $4000/month to loan two applicants each half a month's rental assistance @ $900, the program maximum.  It was important that these loans were definitively analyzed because each put the client beyond the reach of further help.  It was an all or nothing situation.  

It should now be clear why it takes $10,000,000 worth of Social Work to deliver $3,000,000 worth of services to the homeless.

And with that ratio, I can absolutely promise you there will be a great deal of talent and human capital invested in proving, by any available means (except, of course, direct observation or economic competition) that the work these Social Workers do is done quite well, indeed, Thank you.  And that is why each year a larger and larger Civil Service workforce takes longer and longer to underserve a shrinking percentage of a homeless population that is not only growing, but growing increasingly younger and older and more frail, and therefore more vulnerable.  Exactly the kind of people least able to stand up for themselves and demand an analysis of why it costs so much to help so few to so little.  Take a look at the last OC Partnership Annual Report and underline every instance of the word "un-duplicated."

Consider the possibility that, almost two decades after the State Mental Hospitals were emptied unto the streets, we still have no idea how to serve even an ounce of program to the homeless, much less Moorlachs's ton.

And this is hardly the forum for examining why a politician would offer a heartfelt opinion in the utter absence of the facts.  That question hasn't had a good answer for centuries.

DFA Speech

Thank you for having me. As you’ve been told, my name is Dwight Smith, and I’m a Catholic Worker. At 61, I’m old enough to remember when there were no homeless people. Hoboes, maybe, but no homeless people. My parents, of course, had a different experience during the Depression. So what happened? I think in my time, it’s not so much that there was a homeless problem as there was a “We should pay less for mental hospitals” program. And yet I also remember talk at that time about reserving welfare checks for those “who truly needed it.”

Because a few poorly paid and overworked Psychiatrists and a lot of highly-skilled nurses were getting the all the money the State was paying too much of, it was easy to get the American Psychiatric Association to agree to a regimen of discharging the patients to the community, where all of California’s psychiatrists could bill for treating them, but without all the expensive nurses. Thus began the emptying of the State Mental Hospitals in the 70’s.

When, within a few short weeks, these patients proved to be more problematic than anticipated, especially without the nurses, they were simply abandoned. Without attentive doctors and committed nurses, the patients first missed appointments, and then quit taking their medicine, and finally exited the group homes where they’d been placed, to become homeless. Since no one had tried the group home program before implementing it statewide, there was nothing to fall back on. We just watched as these truly deserving welfare recipients did without. Without mental health care, without medical care, without shelter, without food.

After about twenty years of hand wringing, the Federal government came up with the “Continuum of Care” where three levels of shelter would replace the State Mental Hospital. The first seven days was, obviously, the emergency shelter level. During that first week the guest sought work, while the shelter provided "two hot meals (hots) and a cot" and very little else. Guests were allowed to re-enter the emergency level every thirty days if they couldn't graduate to the transitional level by finding a job. The big difference between the shelters and the State Mental Hospitals was now, everyone was told to look for work, so over the next 20 years, what few shelter beds there were got used mostly for the merely unemployed, and, as a result, the mentally-ill people ended up in our prisons and jails. The shift in difference was in the definition of “grave disability.” When I worked at County Mental Health in San Diego in 1977, grave disability meant that people were unable to rent an apartment and prepare their own meals, because of mental illness. Now it means they’re incapable of foraging from a dumpster, or accepting an offered sandwich.

Now, there’s another group of people that really didn’t figure into the decision to eliminate mental hospitals, even though they’re incapable, then and now, of even foraging in a dumpster for their dinner, although not on account of mental illness. It’s on account of their age. I’m talking here about homeless children, and I’d like to expose the two faces of Orange County’s supposed attempts to assist them. From December first through April Fool’s, the OC does a pretty OK job. Now that the Illumination Foundation is providing emergency shelter to the families that present at the Cold Weather Armory, the medical model they use insures that all relevant variables in a child’s life are addressed, and for as long as needed. But through no fault of the Foundation, their saving oversight is permitted in an emergency only when the operation of the Cold Weather Armory program results in a fair probability of the press getting involved. Since about 200 families are assisted during the four months while the Armory program is running, it stands to reason that about 400 are being mistreated the other eight months of the year.

When the press isn’t watching, from April Fool’s through December First, the County lies to the public, and worse, to the parents, and, only if pressed, do their Social Workers offer them a 14-day “once-in-a-lifetime” voucher for a cheap motel like the Buena Park Rodeway Inn. The last family we assisted was unaware that the County voucher plan they were on didn’t include the Continental Breakfast everyone else was enjoying. The dad was actually sobbing as he described how the manager actually scooped up his kids half-eaten cereal bowls as he hounded them out of the dining area, screaming in Hindi. Later that day, an agent for Mercy House brought the family two cans of chili. Two cans of chili for five people for two weeks. Now you might not think that’s a lot, but it’s more actual food than the County gave to anyone else last year. You see, instead of food, most families get EBT cards.

There may be no better way of destroying families with wasted tax dollars than the EBT program. Unlike the surplus agricultural commodities program it replaced, there is no “surplus” of tax dollars for the input, and there’s no such thing as “having enough” on the output. While those of us in the real food business concern ourselves with the needs of the homeless and are constantly conscious of “serving concrete” by offering too much of the wrong thing, the EBT program might as well have been set up to insure that every spare dollar, and even some needed ones, go right for the “wrong thing,” and here I’m not just talking about dietary preferences.

In 2008 I told the County Director of Homelessness that I would not be able to continue sheltering children if they could not halt the exchange of EBT funds for between two or three ounces of crystal meth which was being imported into our ministry every month, to be sold on credit. Between the madness of parents stealing away on week-long speed runs and the use of physical violence to collect on drug debts, the collective proximity of so many children and so much insanity led me to conclude that nothing the County did to them could be worse. So we gave them back. We allowed the children we had temporarily placed in the Armory while we repaired the restrooms to again become the County’s problem. It’s a decision I’ll regret for the rest of my life.

I was wrong: the County was much worse. By fraudulently declaring one child from each family so “seriously mentally-ill” that the entire family qualified for room and board, the County was able to use State funds to place all these people into a housing project and provide family therapy, while simultaneously overlooking the fact that what they were that they were dealing with were the perfectly normal children of drug addicts. How reminiscent of the 70’s.

You see, like it or not, we had established a program that minimized the number of hours these children interacted with their toxic parents. By encouraging them instead to spend their time at Hope school, and at the Boys and Girls Club of Santa Ana, and with volunteers, we limited their parental interactions to just a few hours on Sunday afternoon. Children were encouraged monetarily to do enough homework so that, at the time they were declared disabled, not one child was working below their grade level in school. Now all but two are.

Under our care for six years the total cost to the taxpayers was nothing. After four years under the care of the County, courtesy of the Renew Program of Providence Healthcare, we have already spent over four million dollars for the nearly complete destruction of the majority of the children that were housed here. This is the moral quality of the decisions made by managers currently in charge of executing the O. C. Board of Director’s shelter program for homeless families. I would encourage each of you to examine the truth of my allegations through your contacts in the press, in County government, and within the Democratic Party. You can obtain a copy of these remarks on the blog attached to our website at www.occatholicworker.org.

Whenever things this evil happen there is always a remnant, a group of people who holds for the old ways; people who try to do the right thing even though it costs. People who know that the Golden rule is about using gold to save our neighbors instead of using up our neighbors and their children to save on gold.

People like you.

In addition to others, and in part because of DFA’s steadfast support since 2004, Isaiah House has managed to expand it’s operation to the extent that we no longer experience census problems – we can always accommodate homeless women and children.

Beyond shelter, the meal we’re enjoying tonight obligates me to remind you of the part of homelessness that is managed largely without local government assistance or even attention. Even with three emergency shelters and two Armories in the County of Orange, we’re still not going to be able to help all 21,000 homeless people. There will still be thousands sleeping rough. Believe it or not, the County has decided to do almost nothing for them. No portable restrooms or showers, and most important, no food. That job falls to us and the other soup kitchens in Orange County.

As the only all-volunteer soup kitchen and food pantry, not only does 100% of a donation to Isaiah House go to providing food to the homeless, we’re also able to enlist the support of the governments’ FEMA and EFAP programs, bringing at least another $1000 dollars worth of food to Orange County’s poor each week at no cost to our donors. Isaiah House provides about 2100 hot meals to the poor of Santa Ana each week, and about half that many again through food pantries that benefit the Lighthouse in Costa Mesa, FoodForLife in Santa Ana, and through Christian Volunteers at various motels throughout the County, including the Rodeway Inn of Buena Park. Tonight I’m going to ask you for something far more precious than money.

I'm begging you to consider leading the OC toward humane behavior in four areas.

We have a kitchen, a budget, and willing workers - all the elements to get communities organized. What we need is political leadership. There are four issues that could greatly benefit from the kind of leadership DFA is currently providing, not just to the Democratic Party but to the Country. Having thanked you globally, allow me to enlist you to organize locally:

• There are no available restrooms in the Civic Center after 6PM and before 6AM.
• Unlike LA and San Diego Counties, EBT cards given to the homeless cannot be used in fast-food restaurants, denying the homeless pre-cooked food and 24/7 restrooms, many of which otherwise require a token to enter.
• Homeless men are not allowed to use the computers in the public library to search for work or even healthcare resources.
• Although there are no emergency shelter beds available anywhere after 2:30, the SAPD nevertheless, in contradistinction to Tobe v. Santa Ana, consistently arrests the homeless for "camping" upon all public property within the City, in spite of the their necessity for sleep.

The DFA has distributed my whitepaper on the COC, the Continuum of Care, which is the culmination of my fifteen years working with the homeless.

Because I am a "religious" volunteer, I don't need to be successful to be funded.

As a result I can reveal the criminal failure that characterizes the OC’s utter dereliction of the homeless.

And I'm happy to point out the “conspiracy” that virtually guarantees subsequent tax-dollars spent on behalf of the homeless will likewise be totally wasted.

So, please, honor me and my decade and a half of failure by reading the COC paper, and then volunteering to organize the OC on behalf of the poor.

Copies are also available by request at dwightlsmith@gmail.com, or feel free to call my cell at (714) 469-4603 (or to give it out freely to the homeless.)

Dwight Smith, occatholicworker.org

Tell me what they sing and I will tell you their theology...

In a recent Christian Century, I read about a wise Pastor who gave some advice to a young seminarian looking for clues which might reveal the inner theological identity of a religious community.

Today as we served lunch to about 200 souls in the government plaza, I wondered if I was just becoming more childish. As the acolytes of local government passed by, scowling, I "turned up the volume."

For fifteen years we Catholic Workers have been "singing the alphabet" while we arrange and then distribute the US mail along with our soup. Knowing how utterly dependent homeless people are for the mail to contain the documents, or even the funds they need for "redemption," I years ago became inured to their repeated requests that I "check again" or "keep a lookout" for their salvific correspondence.

To allay their fears that we might miss something, we began pulling an entire sheaf of incoming envelopes, gathered by the first letter of the last name, and crying out, "Doing the "M's," or "Doing the R's!" Then we would proceed to sing out the surnames so everyone in our soup-line could hear their "call."

Over the years I became culturally more sensitive. I pride myself on begin able to pronounce Spanish and Vietnamese surnames. In a lower voice I can almost guess how the mortified parents from Detroit and Mississippi would have their kid's names properly pronounced all these years later in this God-forsaken place so far from home.

By saying aloud every surname beginning with a given letter of the alphabet for every single communicant, we have arrived at a process that largely allays the fears of those for whom no check ever comes.

This process, a hymn of sorts, is the way we sing the names of the children whose ship won't be coming in; for those whose only ship is deportation; and for those whose forebears "already got their trip" on a slave ship many years ago. We sing the names of those who will not be rescued this time around.

We sing out these names, a tiny balm over anxious and troubled waters, and we sit with the empty-handed until, on rare occasions and after many, many years, they raise their own voices in song.

It is then, thanks to your Pastors' message to a young seminarian, that I now recognize the hymnal of our theology: I now hear the loud, clear voice of those who have turned, undistracted by wealth or power or even sustenance, utterly toward the Cross.

It is the song of those reconciled to the singular sufficiency of the Redemption Himself; of those for whom no lesser counterfeit will suffice.

Thank you for your much needed and salvific interpretation.

Tomorrow I pray that I might listen anew to the sound of my friends, silently singing of the Love that will at last their terrible suffering relieve.

Thank you for showing me how to follow this sweet, sweet sound.

Quintessential Dilemma of Aggrieved Anarchists

Dear 99%,

Upon the occasion of reading emails (lots) about how the City of Santa Ana doesn't respect the Constitution and how [we're] going to bankrupt the City treasury, I dragged the following good advice from my thin store of anecdotage...

As an anarchist who has successfully sued the City, please let me offer the following two-part dose of experience, strength and hope:

The first part is an outgrowth of the difference in our structures - CW membership is communitarian, our leadership nominative by unanimous selection. This allowed us to select one person to be the plaintiff, and then later offer a defined group of plaintiffs. Courts and lawyers won't deal with an undefined plaintiff. Without a plaintiff(s), there's not going to be a suit! (This also implies being able to say additionally and definitively, who is not a plaintiff, even if they disagree!)

The second part was the hardest for me: Learning to pick a lawyer and then foregoing the right to talk, completely, except to answer questions. If any of you have experience with criminal law where the DA really wants to get you, you know even criminal law is arcane, intelligent, demanding; so much so that we have the saying about having a fool for a defendant. Civil law is harder still, and I believe the intersection between the Constitution and City Councils represents some of the most difficult legal practice out there. Witness how many truly great lawyers have toiled in that garden. Those are the decisions that occupy Supreme Courts.

While I am thrilled at the exuberance of the local Occupy Movement, I can tell you why it "Has no legal department."

If you don't undertake the difficult changes I've alluded to, you will persist in confusing email with briefs and hyperbole with useful theories. The only thing those will do is give the City something interesting to cite when it's time to negotiate a settlement offer!

When we finished our lawsuit in 2003, we were owed an estimated $650,000, and we declined to take it: The City, not the Council, is the 99% - how could we steal from our neighbors and their old-age pensions? BTW, that award was for legal fees, not damages. Our cause managed to attract and we managed to obey 20 law firms at once, or we would have been "stalled out." The City can easily defeat one honest, intelligent lawyer - the jails are filled with their clients.

It's time to decide whether OccupyOC is willing to make the kinds of necessary, inevitable compromises that come with civilization: representation, agency and stare decesis.

At this point I don't know how, meaning by what process, you're all going to decide.

I only know what will happen if you don't.

Shelter vs. Hospitality

Last weekend Leia and I attended the Catholic Worker Gathering in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In preparation for working with Robert Schuller III to start a seminary built along the lines of the Rule of St. Benedict, I opted for the Benedictine Spirituality workshop. I got my head handed to me, so I’m reaching out to you for consolation.

After joining into “silent prayer” with the others I asked about a Benedictine Monastery that “never turned anyone away” I desperately needed to know how this miracle was being worked. Were it true, I would count it among Medjugore and Fatima as a miracle for our millennia.

“Are they above the Arctic Circle?” I asked. Not quite, but it did develop that they were in an outpost so remote that no one had ever heard of the nearby town.

“How do they exit guests?” I asked, and my heart sank in my chest as it was apparent that the bearer of these glad tidings was unclear about that reality as well.

I said that, rather than boasting of some distant mirage, it would be a lot more instructive to examine how the Rule of St. Benedict might help us to discern who to exit when our shelter was full: Did we honor the ongoing claim of the longest-staying guest, or exit them in favor of a newcomer. Or did we do what most government shelters do, and simply post a sign saying “Full” and turn away everyone, regardless of their circumstances?

I proposed that the “Preferential Option for the Poor” and the Parable of the 99th Sheep argued for at least something more interactive than a “Full” sign. I’m afraid I went on a tad too long about our travails here in Orange County, so much so that I exasperated my counterpart from the Midwest, who cried out, “I think some of us don’t know the difference between shelter and hospitality.”

I stand convicted, and I find myself in complete agreement. After 20 years of helping my wife run the largest CW in the country, I must admit that I know very little about "doing" hospitality. I am haunted by the idea that the definition of “neighbor” in our exegesis for the Greatest Commandment might include people who don’t actually sleep under the same roof, and that the poor wretch standing on the porch dismayed at our “Full” sign might actually be much poorer than someone who is too proud to accept their parents’ (or children’s) insistent and repeated offer of lodging.

As the lawyer in the Parable of the Good Samaritan “plea bargains” for our souls, the economist in me recalls that reality dictates that we can do less (per person) the wider our definition of neighbor becomes. But less is not worse, because no part of reality is bad.

Bad is when we decide that holiness happens more readily when we close the door to our houses, and then our hearts, so that we can appreciate and control what happens, as if we were doing hospitality, instead of God.

We offer shelter, and, like our guests, we pray God will reward us with hospitality – in this world and the next. What startles me is how easy it is to see how my "spirituality" could result in an increase in the suffering of some wretch I would turn away. The man questioning my holiness had dropped his census from 40 each night down to 5, and recommended we do the same.

This isn't the first time truly holy and soulful people have told us that merely sheltering so many folks was a recipe for disaster - so I must concede the possibility that our adoption of the Kirwan legacy is mere ego, and that God might be better served if we were to examine the possibility of shrinking our numbers.

I'm throwing open the door of our hearts, and I'm fully prepared to accept a lack of comments on your part as a roaring commendation: No news is good news, indeed!

The more of you who don't write comments asking us to throw folks out, the better. So please, instead pray for us, and for all Catholic Workers, and encourage us to stay alive to the cries we cannot hear: for the people on our porch who have never seen a "full" sign, and for the donors and volunteers who sustain us by remaining a silent majority.

Those are the people from whom we shall learn the difference between shelter and hospitality.